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Vietnam’s proximity to China has been a positive factor on the smaller country whose government recently sought to regulate and legislate Bitcoin and other virtual currencies, according to Dominik Weil of Bitcoin Vietnam.

Though Weil believes the move should be applauded and that Vietnam still has a long way to go. He says via email:

“In regards to Bitcoin, we definitely see it as a positive factor. China is a global leader in regards to Fintech Innovation and the “little brother” in the South is observing very closely the moves happening in China, which has demonstrated over the last three decades that the change and reform towards a more free-market economy can catapult you to become the global economic powerhouse within just a generation.”

The Vietnam government agencies’ efforts to regulate and legislate Bitcoin and other virtual currencies have been going on since at least 2014, Weil adds, noting that as the first fully registered Bitcoin brokerage service in Vietnam, Bitcoin Vietnam contributed in recent years in some ways to the background work that got Vietnam to its current level of involvement with virtual currencies. One of such is the platform’s direct involvement with relevant agencies and the Bitcoin Saigon community to put together Vietnam’s first international Fintech and Blockchain Conference, BlockFin Asia, in June 2016 which had the State Bank of Vietnam in attendance.

“Well, we expect increasing awareness and market growth – and once legislation passed also easier ability to make use of the technology and the benefits it provides in the established corporate and business environment in Vietnam,” Weil says about what would likely happen to Bitcoin in Vietnam in the coming months or a year based on your market outlook. “So far, Bitcoin has been mostly generated interest by computer geeks and other underserved and fringe parts of the population – but the time is ripe now to deploy the underlying technology on a larger scale for the benefit of the competitiveness of the Vietnamese business landscape.”

Bitcoin Vietnam is also involved in cash2vn, a remittance platform for the Vietnamese market and it brought the first Bitcoin ATM into Vietnam in Summer this year.

In a proposal, the Vietnamese authorities revealed that the lack of a legal framework regulating virtual currencies is costing the country some of its needed investments. The latest development is a twist to the view previously held by the Bank of Vietnam in 2014 when it banned Bitcoin use in the country.